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<title>as justice loves to sit and watch everything go wrong by rudderless in an ocean of stars (ellieindelibly)</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24021700">as justice loves to sit and watch everything go wrong</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieindelibly/pseuds/rudderless%20in%20an%20ocean%20of%20stars'>rudderless in an ocean of stars (ellieindelibly)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>until every fire is extinguished and every home is rebuilt [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Batwoman (TV 2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst and Feels, Character Study, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Introspection, Not Canon Compliant, the kane twins actually being sisters and not betraying one another</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 00:41:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,076</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24021700</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieindelibly/pseuds/rudderless%20in%20an%20ocean%20of%20stars</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Are you happy I killed him?” Kate asks, and she hates herself for not being able to fight the urge to ask this question in the first place. There was a time when she wouldn’t have had to wonder how the woman sitting on the other side of the couch felt about anything, a time when they were merely children, two perfectly fitted halves of the same once-inseparable whole. </p><p>//</p><p>The one in which no one tries to lock Alice up after they all bury a body together.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Beth Kane | Alice &amp; Kate Kane</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>until every fire is extinguished and every home is rebuilt [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1732717</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>as justice loves to sit and watch everything go wrong</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This picks up just a few hours after the previous piece, whose title I changed from ‘cold and dark as the deepest grave’ to ‘until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world’ when I officially made this into a series. As stated in the series notes, all titles have been and will continue to be taken from Lemony Snicket’s The Beatrice Letters, because this is a love letter to Beth Kane.</p><p>Enjoy. :)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Are you happy I killed him?” Kate asks, and she hates herself for not being able to fight the urge to ask this question in the first place. There was a time when she wouldn’t have had to wonder how the woman sitting on the other side of the couch felt about anything, a time when they were merely children, two perfectly fitted halves of the same once-inseparable whole. </p><p>That time has long since passed, and she mourns for the person that Alice might have been, the Beth that she’d gotten to see and know and fail to save all over again thanks to a glitch in the rewriting of the universe, just as she’d failed to save this world’s version of her sister that day on the bridge.</p><p>There is a weary resignation to Alice’s next words, each one falling from her lips and into the space between them like stones being dropped into a lake.</p><p>“I’m glad he’s dead,” she says, taking her time to shape every consonant and vowel out with the same precise and exacting care that Kate remembers Beth used to write with when they were learning as kids, her script painstakingly neat in comparison to Kate’s rushed scrawl. “I’m not happy that it hurt you to do it, but I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad that he can’t hurt anyone anymore.”</p><p>There is a story that Kate remembers reading as a little girl, one that came from a big book of beautifully illustrated fairy tales that she’d borrowed from the vast library at Wayne Manor. The details are slippery now, like silver fish darting away from the clumsy, grasping fingers of a child playing in a stream, but Kate remembers bits and pieces of it all the same. The piece that comes to mind now is about the girl in the story, from whose lips fell precious jewels and flowers every time she spoke. Every kernel of truth that Kate has gleaned from her sister tonight feels like a pearl dropped into the palm of her hand. Rare, precious, and worth infinitely more than the buried remains of a monster left to be forgotten in the woods.</p><p>As much as it has taken to get to this odd in-between place where they can be honest with each other, where Kate can ask a question and brace herself for a lie that <em>won’t</em> come... Perhaps it is a price she can learn to bear the weight of. After all, wasn’t there a time when she would have paid any price to have her sister back, no matter how steep the cost? There had been a time when she’d slept in a chair waiting for the phone to ring, when she’d committed a map of Gotham to memory and dreamt of bright red marker lines pointing Kate right to her sister, her twin, the missing piece of her soul. (A time before the lie based on a falsified DNA test had been told, before Kate had been forced to learn how to bury the feeling that something wasn’t quite right, that Beth was still alive somewhere out in the world. That Beth was just waiting to be found, waiting to come <em>home</em>.)</p><p>“You were right,” Kate says softly, keeping her voice low even though there’s really no need to be quiet. Not here, at least, not in the privacy of her own home. The words scrape at the lining of her throat and settle into empty space around them like the heavy, smothering smoke of their burning car hanging off of that bridge all those years ago. The words taste like ash and failure and bitter regret, but she tries again anyway. “We’re not so different after all.”</p><p>“Oh, Kate,” Alice sighs, a small, sad smile playing at the edges of her mouth. “But I was just starting to think that I was wrong.”</p><p>They lapse into an odd sort of silence then, one that’s neither comfortable enough to enjoy or strained enough to encourage either one to break it. So Kate sits in her corner of the couch with her knees tucked under her chin and her arms wrapped tightly around her legs, and settles in to wait without really knowing what she’s waiting for.</p><p>After what feels like an eternity but a quick glance at her phone tells her has only been half an hour, she sighs and finds herself genuinely surprised by the sight that greets her when she turns to look towards her sister. Alice is fast asleep on her end of the couch, slumped sideways with her head against the armrest and her sock-clad feet pulled up onto the cushions as well. She’s curled up tight like she’s cold or- Kate thinks grimly back to Cartwright’s earlier words- as though she’s bracing herself against violence even in her sleep. </p><p>Beth never slept like that when they were kids. Every time she’d crawled into Kate’s bed after a nightmare or when they wanted to stay up late reading books together with a flashlight under the covers, Beth would inevitably end up hogging both the sheets and the mattress space. As much as she’d feigned annoyance or teased her twin back in those days, Kate had never minded any of it. They were sisters after all, and after that terrible day on the bridge, Kate had stayed up more nights that she could count thinking about how she would have gladly spent the rest of her life sleeping on the edge of her own bed with barely any part of the covers to keep her warm if it had meant having Beth right there beside her once more.</p><p>For a moment, Kate considers nudging Alice awake- surely she hadn’t meant to fall asleep here, in Kate’s apartment of all places- but the sight of the dark shadows under her sister’s eyes ultimately convince her otherwise. Instead, she eases herself off of the couch with as much stealth as she can manage and retreats to her room to grab the folded blanket at the foot of her bed before slipping back out into the living room. </p><p>Something soft and warm and bright begins to blossom in the space between her ribs as Kate carefully covers her sleeping sister with the thick, cozy blanket before retreating back to the other side of the couch, where she goes back to sitting quietly but no longer feels like she’s waiting for something unknown.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Leave a review, donate a fuzzy blanket to the Kane twins.</p><p>All works will be oneshots in this now AU version of events unless stated otherwise, so please consider subscribing to the series rather than the individual works if you want to see what happens next. :D</p><p>Feel free to yell at me on tumblr: @rudderless-in-an-ocean-of-stars or, since I’m rarely there these days, yell at me on Instagram: @lavender.beth where I also post Batwoman memes and edits. :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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